Trick or Treat! Or, Halloween Is More Fun with Poofy Hair.

I have some extra time tonight so I'm going to get started on the beginning of the trip....

After what seemed like 5 hours on the plane, I landed bright and early in sunny California, picked up my rental car, and headed south for San Diego. I was still pretty sick and sounded like a man but soon realized the curative powers of taquitos and started to feel better. My buddy Kat had a colour guard practice so I headed out for Jamba Juice, Target, and the Beach. In other words? The Holy Trinity of What California Means to Me.

I got to the beach a bit late so the sun was pretty much down by the time I arrived. It was also super cloudy so my shots are all a little... mysterious looking.

After some quality time communing with the water and the strange asian dude who skated by me with his leg up in the air whilst listening to techno beats, I headed over to Target......... and got totally lost on the way and ended up at Jamba Juice. Lemons? Lemonade (smoothie)! After some hardcore sipping and shopping, I headed back to the high school to pick up Kat.

FIRST MAJOR DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CANADA AND THE US: The football field was fucking triiiiiiiiiiiiicked out! Lights, bleachers, scoreboard, you name it, they had it. It looked like Raptor's Stadium, only outside and with less purple dinosaur. I can say with outmost confidence that we in Canada do not supe our fields up that much. I blame it on the snow and our and love for anything indoors covered in ice.

After practice Kat was nice enough to take me around for a mini-tour of downtown San Diego and can I just say? ADORABLE! I know I use that word a lot lately (I blame the recent, um, interest in Michael Cera for it), but I really mean it this time. And plus the downtown core was crawling with nasty girls not wearing pants for Halloween so you know that if I can overlook that little tidbit I truly think something is beautiful. I think what won me over was that they had actual gaslamps lighting some of the streets! I liked the vibe, very old-timey, very Interview-with-the-Vampire (have I mentioned that I am sorta obsessed with vampires? I blame Twilight and True Blood.... swooooon).

We finished up our tour just in time to pick up Cheryl & Rikki from the airport and then head over to In&Out for some burger animal style. (Didn't know that there was an animal style optsh? I guess you have to be in with the Cali crowd to know that. No big deal.). Deeeeelish. Then it was off to bed for me while the ladies chatting with our sexy friend Conor in Australia via Skype. Because they are true friends, they took pictures of me sleeping and sent them to Conor. (But don't worry, I am plotting my revenge.)

Now, Halloween! I haven't dressed up in YEARS so it was a nice change to get gussied up with the girls. Even better? We got to go to a Mraz concert afterwards and celebrate in style.

And without further adieu, I will reveal the much-anticipated Halloween costume idea:

I dressed up (if you can call it that, I call it simply being true to the voice in my heart) A COUGAR.

Ha! It was like my every dream come true, from the blue eyeshadow to the leopard headband, to the creepy homemade t-shirt. We went with a Mraz-theme so we ironed-on different saying to our shirts for the various band members/instruments. And, because we like to go whole hog, we even made up personas to go with our shirts (and by we, I mean me and I forced said personas on my ever-so-patient friends).

Rikki was Argentina, where the g(spot) is silent. She had "sTRUMPET" on her shirt.
Kat was Vienna, sausages (no big deal). She had "HIT THIS" on her ass.
Cheryl was Asia, where this is always a happy ending. She had "saXXXy" on her shirt.
I was Venice, take a ride down my canals. I had "Master my low end" on my shirt.

The show itself was lovely. I had never seen J outdoors so it was a real treat. We sang, we danced, we did not steal things because it's wrong. We also took some group pics but as I was weilding the camera I am not in any of them. A kind stranger offered to take a picture with me in it but, well, judge for yourself how it turned out.

Here's the one I took. Much better!

Post-show we all ran out to grab some Denny's and I discovered the most amazing thing: potachos. It combines my two very favourite things in the world into one exciting dish: pot and achos. It's also described as having "lots of cheese" so I was very down with it. I ended up doing a bacon-hashbrown combo though as I needed my protein/grease fix to better fight my cold. The potachos had to wait.

All in all, it was a great first 2 days to the trip. And lucky me I still had the LA show and 2 extra days with my girl Rikki to look forward to.

Big shout outs go to Philly & Jon Koch, the SoCal Mraz mainstays and all around cool folk. Both of them were kind enough to pose for pictures with us, despite the abundance of spandex and glitter.

Also mad propz go out to Tab & Kevin for being adorable and awesome and to Kevin espesh for looking most like the person he dressed up as for Halloween (next time I vote more underwear, though).